Since you have a 3DS and love Pokémon I would suggest HeartGold/SoulSilver, I will always hold those games in high regard (even though it’s maybe partly nostalgia as Gen 2 was the peak of the Pokémon craze during my childhood). But I still think Gen 2 was great and still not yet filled with complete trash designs (figuratively and literally).
Though if you plan on procuring it the seafaring fashion you’d miss out on the Pokewalker!
Yeah I’m buying any game I can on GOG these days. Between being DRM-free and being pre-patched (sometimes with community patches) it’s definitely the best platform, particularly if you like to buy older games/retro games occasionally.
Funny, for me it’s the other way around. I probably played a couple hundred hours of Oblivion back in the day: modding, exploring and restarting. Never once finished the main quest. I’m thinking Skyblivion might be my chance to finally do it.
Been playing Sleeping Dogs for the first time after picking it up for cheap on a GOG sale. I never played it back in the day and never heard much about it, but man, even 13 years later this is a good looking game. I guess I’m giving it a leg up by using DLDSR and RTX HDR, but still. It looks very impressive for its age. I can’t believe this was a PS3 game! The streets are crowded and the city looks great. Though I will say, playing something like this hammers home even more what a marvellous piece of architecture and level design Night City is in Cyberpunk 2077. Hong Kong looks nice and all in Sleeping Dogs, but it doesn’t have near the same character, the same variety and the same distinct but different districts as NC does.
The game has been very enjoyable, though. To a certain extent you might call it slop. And yes, it might not be Disco Elysium or Bioshock or Alan Wake 2, but not every game needs to be. You can’t eat salad every day. Sometimes you need a pizza. And this is a pretty fucking good pizza. It’s got all the trappings of a GTA clone you might expect, with a chinese flavour that adds some kung-fu to the mix and a boilerplate undercover cop story to make the tension tick along and let it at least pretend it’s somewhat different. The pacing has been very snappy so far as well. Almost no downtime, as far as I can tell. After playing some lengthy CRPGs lately that really tested my patience it’s been the perfect antidote - ideal brain-off gameplay, whether racing cars or beating up thugs (or singing karaoke).
I’m only about halfway so far, but from what I’ve seen so far I thoroughly recommend it if you like these kinds of games, especially if you can pick it up at a big discount - it was 80% off recently and at that price it’s a no-brainer.
I can’t believe I blanked on them in my own reply, but to piggyback off your Restoration Project nomination: the Talking Heads Addon and Talking Heads Actually Talk Mod for Fallout 2 Restoration Project (updated) are both absolutely insane, and breath some new life into the game while seamlessly slotting in next to the existing art and voice acting.
Splinter Cell was primarily an Xbox franchise, so if you’ve got an Xbox of any kind that’s probably your best bet, assuming they’re still for sale. I believe they were all developed for Xbox and ported to other platforms. For Chaos Theory in specific though the PC port was pretty good, so if you don’t it’s not a big problem. Possibly some controller issues that need a fan fix? Though on the plus side you can find a wide-screen fix mod for modern resolutions. The first two games had worse ports, if I remember right. And the Playstation and GameCube ports were pretty universally bad I think, for all the games.
The one where the console version is really important is Double Agent, but that is a whole other can of complicated worms, because then it wasn’t just the matter of bad ports - they released two completely different games with different mechanics, levels and story executions (albeit the same overall plot).
I want to highlight two mod makers, instead of single mods. lStewieAl and WallSoGB for their efforts unfucking New Vegas. Being forced to pick a single effort, the engine optimizations is probably the most impressive. Honorable mention to all the various script extenders that make so many fantastic mods possible in the first place.
The first couple games are really good stealth games, highly recommended. There is not really an overarching story between games, so if you’re just looking to dip your toes into the series I’d start with Chaos Theory. Honestly, if you’re into stealth games you should really play it like, right now. I consider it an all-time great.
After Double Agent the series started going into a more bland action style as Ubisoft felt stealth games were too niche I guess. Never played Conviction or Blacklist but as I said, I heard good things about the co-op in the latter so it’s on my list to try. I don’t really have a good candidate to play co-op with at the moment though, so it’s on indefinite hold.
Cooperative stealth is an interesting genre, not that well represented either. Did you ever play a Splinter Cell game with your friend? The earlier games had wholesale co-op campaigns, and I’ve heard really good things about the co-op in Blacklist too, though I never played that one myself.
I have no idea how AC2 holds up, honestly. I’ve never replayed it and it was my first game in the series - I didn’t own a Playstation when the first one came out so I only experienced it through being over at a friend’s house and watching him play it, occasionally taking turns for missions. Playing AC2 was an incredible experience back when it released and I’m full of fond memories, but I don’t know how well it’s aged. It’s probably a less impactful experience now than it was 15 years ago.
I do it with MSI Afterburner, then do stress tests in 3D Mark to make sure it’s stable. As long as you’re not over-volting you’re fairly safe to experiment. You can either do a flat undevolt, or you can set up a custom curve. Also like another commenter here said, changing the fan curve to actually engage the fans sooner helps keep the temps down, usually the default fan curve prioritizes silence to a disturbing degree.
I think it is pretty much confirmed that Unity’s poor launch led to the hard pivot to the “modern” RPG style AC games. I remember reading about it at the time. The only reason Syndicate wasn’t changed was it was already too far into production when Unity released.
I really like Unity. I’ll always have a special nostalgic feeling about the Ezio saga that makes me hold them in especially high regard, but even so Unity is probably my favourite to play. Revolutionary Paris is an amazing setting and it’s so beautifully realised too, and the parkour system with free run up/down and all the myriad animations lets you do some of the most slick things in the entire AC series if you get good at it. I’ve linked AC Unity choreography before, but just look at what people can do when they’re good at this game.
This is well treaded ground and I agree with pretty much everything. I tried to get through RDR2 twice last year but whenever I was doing main story missions I would get frustrated. Partly because of your points, but also for another reason: how the hell can you maintain immersion in the story when the protagonist effectively commits genocide? Seriously the kill count in the missions is so ludicrously high I want to quit every time I do a couple of main story missions. Like I get it, you want to sprinkle some action sequences in there to keep up the tempo, but I can’t take killing a hundred lawmen in some town in a main mission and then have the world go on as if nothing happened.